// Default Mode
I was called a daydreamer at school. It wasn’t a compliment.
I think it’s the most important skill I have. And I feel it has atrophied.
There’s a part of your brain that only works when you stop trying.
The Default Mode Network. Cyborg sounding name for the most important system in your head. It’s the network that activates when you’re not focused on a task. When you’re walking, daydreaming, staring out the window, lying in the dark before sleep. Neuroscientists used to call this activity “noise.” Turned out it was the opposite.
The DMN is where synthesis happens. Where your brain quietly connects things that have no obvious connection. Where you work out what you actually think about something. Where you imagine futures, rehearse conversations, notice patterns across things that happened weeks apart. It’s not downtime. It’s the work that makes everything else make sense.
The switch
The brain runs on two modes that compete with each other. The DMN (background, associative, self-referential) and the task networks, which handle focused execution. When one is on, the other is largely off.
I have ADHD, which means mine doesn’t switch cleanly. Task-mode and default-mode bleed into each other. I hyperfocus on the wrong things. I drift in the wrong moments. Give my brain structured time with no input, a walk, a long shower, an early morning before anyone needs anything, and the DMN does what it’s supposed to. Give it a phone and it fragments.
The attention economy runs on exactly this switch. What’s new here isn’t that it happens. It’s what’s actually being switched off.
What restores it
The blank page isn’t an obstacle. It’s the DMN warming up. The moments that feel most unproductive are often when it’s most active. Queues. Commutes. The gap before sleep. We’ve filled them all with scrolling and podcasts and called it productive. It wasn’t.
I love reading books about magic, the occult and counterculture. They’re like catnip for my ADHD brain. One of my favourites is Austin Osman Spare. His book The Book of Pleasure: The Psychology of Ecstasy introduces the idea of sigils.
The method: form an intention clearly. Reduce it to an abstract symbol. Then forget it. Enter a state of mental vacancy. Let the symbol sink below conscious awareness. Spare’s belief was that the unconscious processes intent more effectively once the conscious mind stops interfering.
He was also a practitioner of automatic drawing. Let the hand move without conscious direction. Don’t decide what to make. Don’t supervise the process. His working theory: the analytical mind is the obstacle.
That’s a specific claim about how intent works. And it maps almost exactly onto what we now understand the DMN to be doing.
Thomas Edison got there too, from a different direction. He used to nap in a chair holding steel ball bearings. The moment he fell asleep, his hands would relax, the balls would drop and wake him. He was fishing in hypnagogia, the threshold state between waking and sleep, where the analytical mind drops away first. He knew that’s where the good stuff was.
Richard D. James reportedly recorded music he heard in lucid dreams and released it as Ambient Works Volume II. Hear it in the threshold state. Transcribe it on waking.
Same territory as Spare’s mental vacancy. Different costume.
The lineage runs forward from Spare through the Surrealists (Breton’s automatic writing, the Exquisite Corpse), through William Burroughs’ cut-ups, through Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies. Different practices. Different decades. Different contexts. The same intuition: something useful happens when you get the analytical mind out of the way.
They were all, without the vocabulary, designing for the DMN.
Designing for it
The DMN needs a gap. Good design could stop closing it.
Remove the pull first. Stop strip-mining attention. No badges. No red dots. No autoplay. No infinite scroll. Design that ends. A podcast app that suggests a stopping point. A reading app that says you’ve been at this for forty minutes. Calm Technology, Mark Weiser’s idea from the nineties, is tech that informs at the periphery rather than demanding the centre. I’ve been talking about it for years. We haven’t built much of it.
Friction is a feature. The iPod is the clearest example I have. Tools that require you to know what you want before they’ll work. The load screen nobody misses maybe gave your brain two seconds to surface something. We optimised that gap away.
Design for completion. Feeds have no end. Albums do. Novels do. Movies do. Things with a shape (beginning, middle, finish) give the DMN somewhere to work with after the experience ends. The walking away from a finished thing is often where the synthesis happens. Design beautiful exits.
Make async the default. Synchronous communication is a continuous demand on the task network. The pressure to respond immediately keeps the DMN offline. Tools that make slow responses socially acceptable, even expected, are DMN-friendly tools. Email is better than Slack in that regard. Slow comms. Remember when a personal letter would take a day or two to arrive in the post? I think we valued them more as a result.
Design smart defaults. Automate the decisions that don’t need you. Setup, configuration, the repetitive choices that are the same every time. Clear those out. What’s left should be worth deciding. Friction in the right places. Not frictionless. The moment of intent should arrive at the decision that earns it, not get spent on the ones that don’t.
Protect the in-between. Don’t fill every gap. The pause is part of the product.
The harder question is whether you can design scaffolding for the DMN rather than just defending space for it. A tool that prompts reflection without demanding response. A journaling interface that asks a question and then goes quiet. Something that feeds the DMN’s pattern-matching without triggering the task network.
That’s the frontier. The rest is defensive. Can we actively cultivate it?
The link
If the DMN is where intent forms, and the research suggests it is, then suppressing the DMN is suppressing intent at a neurological level.
AI doesn’t have a DMN. It can execute, retrieve, match patterns at scale. It can’t daydream. It can’t notice, on a Tuesday morning, that two things you read six months apart are actually the same problem. That’s yours.
In an age of AI, the DMN isn’t less valuable. It’s the only thing that isn’t replaceable.
The intention deficit isn’t a metaphor. There may be a mechanism.
Dreaming aloud
I wrote an earlier piece about a period I’ve been trying to unpick. Roughly 2010 to 2014. Interesting minds were imagining in public. Genuinely strange ideas about what technology and culture could do. Then most of them got jobs at the big firms and went behind NDAs. The conversation stopped.
I called what was missing dreaming aloud. Borrowed the phrase from Rory Pilgrim’s Turner Prize-nominated work, RAFTS.
“So we can dream aloud / Dream aloud / And squeeze it / And breathe it / Alive, alive, alive”
Dreaming aloud is the DMN going public. When you share the synthesis, you’re not just finishing a thought. You’re starting someone else’s. Their DMN picks up the thread.
Countercultural movements are collective dreaming aloud. People who look at the dominant order and start imagining differently, out loud, together. That’s how alternative futures get built.
The attention economy, the hustle culture, the NDA. They all close the same gap. No space to think means nothing worth sharing.
I think the fizziness is coming back. My ADHD antennae tend to be sensitive to these shifts and they’re picking something up. More people imagining in public. More willingness to look strange.
Dream aloud. See who picks up the thread.
I'd love to tell you more.
// DAW Sketch Namer
My music WIP folder is a graveyard of jams and sketches with names like “asdfgh” and “New 33”. I never know what any of them are. I made this to help sort that out.